Eleanor Catton

Novelist

1985-09-24

Eleanor Catton is a New Zealand novelist best known for The Luminaries, which won the 2013 Booker Prize. She was the youngest winner of the prize at the time of that award.

Quotes by Eleanor Catton

But could he endure it, that other men knew her in a way that he, Staines, did not? He did not know.
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The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-light— grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.
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The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family, the sax teacher continues. Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of themselves.
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for Pop, who sees the starsand Jude, who hears their music
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Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.
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The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-light— grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.
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for Pop, who sees the starsand Jude, who hears their music
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But could he endure it, that other men knew her in a way that he, Staines, did not? He did not know.
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The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family, the sax teacher continues. Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of themselves.
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Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.
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We throw at female artists this expectation that their work has to speak to the female experience. And if it doesn't, you're letting the side down. Throwing this stumbling block in the way of female artists is counterintuitive.
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There are so many ways of posturing that people associate with being a writer. They imagine you wearing a beret and drinking only red wine and being full of yourself, and so, for a long time, the way I felt about writing was too private. I felt it too important and didn't want to be teased about it. So I lied about it.
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To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.
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I grew up on the South Island of New Zealand, in a city chosen and beloved by my parents for its proximity to the mountains - Christchurch is two hours distant from the worn saddle of Arthur's Pass, the mountain village that was and is my father's spiritual touchstone, his chapel and cathedral in the wild.
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I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. It's always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact it's so supple and sly.
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I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting.
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My sense of injustice about our family's 'weirdness' in not owning a car was amplified by the fact that we did not own a television, either - my parents were unapologetic about this and told me very cheerfully that I would thank them for it when I was older, which was quite true.
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I have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries.
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There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.
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My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home.
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